CS 5973: Neuro/Cognitive Projects

The semester-long project constitutes a significant percentage of your
class grade. Projects will be experimental in nature, requiring a
carefully-designed computational hypothesis, a computer
implementation, an experiment, and an analysis of the results.
Project topics must be based on a
set of at least three papers drawn from the literature; one of these
papers must be drawn from the set of papers on the course schedule page. With approval,
students may collaborate on projects in groups of size two. In these
projects, it must be clear that there is a significant and
differentiable contribution that can be made by each student.

For those students who do not have a significant background in
programming, we will make every effort to design an appropriate
collaborative project.

All project-related materials must be handed in on the specified due
date: for in-class presentations, you must be ready to present in
class; written materials are due at 23:59. Written materials may be handed in via email or the
course blackboard.

Deadlines

Sept 15: 1-page project proposal due

Sept 20: In-class presentation of project proposal

Oct 18: In-class presentation of project status

Nov 8: In-class presentation of project status

Nov 19: Draft of final paper due

Nov 29: Peer paper reviews due

Dec 6: Final paper due

Dec 8: Final project presentations

Dec 14 (4:30-6:30): project presentations continued

Project Proposal

1-page due on September 15th at 23:59

Postscript/pdf/raw text (no doc files, please)

The proposal should answer:

What is the behavioral/neural domain to which you are connecting?

Why is it interesting?

What is the computational problem to be solved?

What is the computational approach (you may not know this in great detail yet,
but take a guess)

What will your experiment(s) look like?

Include proper references!

Project Ideas

Grounding Symbols for Color Descriptions

Domain: how do children learn the meaning of the names
of colors? In other words, how do they learn the relationship
between their perception of color and the symbols used to
describe the colors?

Interesting because:

Children learn this mapping through example pairings of
images and the symbols.

The examples and the symbols are often ambiguous.

The symbol classes are often overlapping.

Computational problem: how to establish a relationship between
a vector space (representing colors) and a discrete space?

A possible computational approach:

Input: tuples consisting of an image and a set of
symbols that describe the color in the image.

Throw out all spatial information: all images are
reduced to a set of pixel colors (3D vectors)

Construct color models for each symbol:

Take the pixel colors of all of the images for which the symbol
is used.

Construct a mixture-of-Gaussian model that best fits the
set of pixels (in a maximum likelihood sense). This is
a representation of the likelihood of a given pixel
vector given the symbol: p(color | symbol)

Given the color models, we can perform the following
experiments:

Given a novel image, generate the symbol(s) that
best describe the color in the image.

Given a symbolic color description and a set of
images, identify the image that best matches the
color description.

How to handle disjunctions of symbols? e.g.,
"this image contains red and blue" (ie pixels are
either red or blue)?

Spatial Concept Grounding from Visual Examples

This project would play out in a manner that is similar to the color
grounding problem. In this case, however, we would like to construct
spatial models of concepts such as "left of," "on top of," and "near."

Instead of constructing models in color space, we would construct
models that capture spatial relationships. Gaussians (or mixtures
thereof) could also be used (although there might be some other
distributions that do a better job).

Interaction of the Dorsal and Ventral Visual Pathways

We understand a fair amount about the roles played by the dorsal and
ventral visual pathways. However, much less is understood about how
these pathways might interact with one-another. Several of the papers
on the reading list represent different aspects of how the
dorsal/ventral computations may take place individually, and in some
cases examine how their interaction might play out. These include:

Model of Development: Choosing which Skills to Learn and When

Many approaches to skill learning are focused on learning an
individual skill (i.e, have a single reward function). In the rare
case in which a set of skills is learned, it is typically the
experimenter that determines the sequence in which the skills are
learned. In contrast, infants and toddlers are constantly "hopping"
from one learning problem to another -- in many cases, this process of
switching between learning tasks is determined internally. What is it
that drives this selection of learning task? We know that selection
cannot be arbitrary: many skills build on top of others that have been
previously learned, and (early in the process) the developing body
does not have the motor strength or representational capability to
take on the more complicated tasks. One computational theme that we
see in a variety of writings (see the curiosity and development section of
the schedule) is that of focusing on areas of "moderate
novelty." This means that the agent actively seeks out experience in
the world in which some success has
already been found, but that high performance has yet to be achieved.

For a class project, one could implement one such mechanism of
development.

Recognition of Grasping Actions

Given a time series of hand position, orientation, and shape, how can
an observing agent extract a deep representation of the
grasping action? In particular, we would like to extract the goal of
the reach (which includes the object identity and the how the object
is to be grasped). Depending upon the application, we may want to be
able to produce a prediction of the goal before the hand actually
arrives at the object. In other applications, we may wish to label a
sequence of pick-and-place operations after the fact.

There are a number of computational theories that attempt to explain
this recognition process. Some of the most interesting are inspired
by Rizzolatti's mirror cell work which suggests that the
control system itself is involved in the recognition process.

Hardware Access

Some of my robot hardware is available for use in your projects. In
addition, some of my students are available to help in the data
collection process.

Stereo vision system: This system can deliver raw
images, but we also have a simple object segmentation system
implemented in matlab that can give 2D and 3D locations of
objects, as well as a number of other object statistics
(blob/object size, orientation, color, etc.). Note that the 3D
component of the system is still being calibrated, but I expect
that it will be up and running by the end of September.

Hand tracker: This system will give very accurate hand
position/orientation and (approximate) finger flexion
information at ~15 Hz. The 3D calibration of the vision system
will place visually-reported positions into the same coordinate frame
as the hand position estimates. If you decide to work with
this data stream, then you should already be familiar with (or
willing to get up to speed on) position and orientation
representations in 3D (so a robotics or a graphics background
will help here).

Final Project Document

For the final project report, we will be using the official ICDL paper
style (this is required). Templates for both latex and M$Word are
available at the ICDL submission
page

Total length of the final report is limited to 6 pages

You should not need to do any more paper reading at this
stage. But - you must discuss (where appropriate) your basis
set of papers and provide proper references

For your paper draft, you should have as much completed as
possible, as this is your primary opportunity to get feedback
(which will be critical for grading of your final report). If
you find yourself running out of time, you should focus on the
core pieces of the paper (these are the components that will
receive the highest weight in the grading): description of the
experimental problem,
hypothesis, experimental approach (with details!), and results
(the other components should at least be outlined).

For a description of the key pieces of a project report, see Writing
a project report by Ray Mooney at U Texas (note that the focus
is on machine learning projects)

Your final project presentation constitutes 10% of your course grade.
At the time of your presentation, your experiments should be complete.
You will have a total of 30 minutes to present your project and to
address questions (so plan on 25 minutes of material).
Your slides should cover:

A reminder of the domain in which you are working.

A description of the particular problem that you are trying to
solve, including:

Why is it interesting/important?

Why is it hard?

A concise statement of your experimental hypothesis.

A description of your computational approach (including the
components, representations, and algorithms).
This needs to be enough detail for your audience to understand
how to begin to replicate your approach. But - you should
limit your discussion of the implementation details that do not
have a bearing on the computational approach. Illustrative
examples are good.

A description of your experiment.

A description of your experimental results. Where appropriate,
include an example of *what* has been learned, aggregate
learning results (showing performance over many task
instances), learning curves, and statistical testing.